


cereal, cities & cynics

by Previously8



Series: mere anarchy at the end of the world [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Humor, Blood and Violence, Cults, Dark Comedy, Gen, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Pre-Slash, Some Plot, kind of, luckily from here on out it's nicer on these dudes, the end of the world happened y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:22:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23833057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Previously8/pseuds/Previously8
Summary: The first person that Dave runs into after the apocalypse is standing in a ransacked Wal-Mart aisle, eating cereal by the handful out of the box.Or, the end of the world happened and everyone's dead, but Dave knows better than anyone that the apocalypse is only cruel to those who had something to look forward to in the first place.Human!AU
Relationships: Dave Strider & Karkat Vantas, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Series: mere anarchy at the end of the world [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1717285
Comments: 49
Kudos: 153





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to the end-of-the-world fic that's been sitting in my drafts since november-- yeah, ironic that the world's gone to shit since then, but this apocalypse was fire and radiation, rather than plague, so I figure I can still post it. I should be able to update twice or three times a week til it's done, since 4/5 chapters are written (total looks like about 12k?) :D 
> 
> Warnings: blood and gore (fairly mild, some violent scenes, arguably not worse than canon), explicit and implicit minor character death (the apocalypse happened), mentions of past trauma and child-abuse (welcome to the strider household), cults.

The first person that Dave runs into after the apocalypse is standing in a ransacked Wal-Mart aisle, eating cereal by the handful out of the box. 

He looks up, just as surprised as Dave no doubt, and around a mouthful of cereal, says, “I’m not Jesus.”

“No shit,” says Dave, and hikes his backpack higher up on his shoulder, wondering if he should just book it.

“Who the fuck are you,” the guy spits and it doesn’t sound like a question as much as a sanctimonious command. 

“No way,” Dave says, just to be contrary. The guy scowls at him, his face turning red like an angry tomato. The casual weight of the sword at his hip is comforting and his hand shifts subtly to the hilt. “You first, Not-Jesus.”

The guy shoves another handful of off-brand Choco-Pops into his mouth and crunches aggressively, frowning at Dave. “Fuck you,” he says when he has swallowed. He wipes the chocolate dust off on his jeans and holds his hand out for Dave to shake. “Karkat.”

Dave has never shaken someone’s hand in his life. He wasn’t aware that people actually did that outside of like, tired commuters in board offices, who stood in front of presentations with five-step plans and wore ties to work. He slides his hand into Karkat’s and shakes it up and down once. Karkat’s hand is warm and smooth and doesn’t have any of the calluses from fighting that Dave’s does. 

“Dave Strider,” he tells Karkat.

Karkat scowls at him further. “And what the fuck are you doing here, Strider?”

“What does it look like?” Dave asks, “gotta get my shopping on, dude. No reason the apocalypse should keep me from my Lucky Charms.”

Karkat’s face contorts into something akin to rage. Dave wonders if maybe he shouldn’t have waited another week before shopping. Clearly not enough people were killed by the radiation if this guy is getting mad about his cereal choices, like it was just a normal Tuesday in Houston. 

“Lucky Charms,” Karkat announces, like he’s standing at a podium, brow scrunched in a dramatic frown, “are an abomination to the designation of food. They taste like a box of glucose fucked a mothball. Disgusting.” He slams a hand emphatically into the box of cereal he’s still holding and looks at Dave like he’s expecting a challenge. “No way did you come here just for the most repulsive cereal known to man.”

He has a certain quality to his speech, like he’s used to being in front of crowds, maybe, or like he knows he’s a leader and not a completely shitty one. Dave has never met someone who used their hands so much when they talked, and never thought he would, especially since most of the other people on the planet are dead now. 

Not that Dave is very familiar with the concept of Jesus—a guy that talked a lot, and founded a religion by accident, he’s pretty sure—but Karkat doesn’t look much like the calendars they sell at the Catholic bookstore. He is wearing old dark jeans, a ratty grey hoodie, and has a backpack on the ground at his feet. The backpack looks worse for wear, though Dave is hardly one to talk. Everything looks a little worse for wear these days, especially in the unlit aisles of the abandoned Wal-Mart. The lack of electric lighting probably helps with the gaping, empty feeling of it, but the bright, untouched but irradiated cereal gives it a surreal appearance. All the same, this guy is clearly weirder than most. 

Maybe only the weird ones survived, Dave thinks. That would explain a lot. 

“Jeez,” Dave says and raises his eyebrows behind his glasses, “what did Lucky Charms ever do to you?” 

Karkat opens his mouth in outrage, probably to go on another loud tirade, but the sound of cans crashing to the ground a few aisles down makes Dave react on instinct, slapping a hand to Karkat’s mouth before another loud word can escape. His other hand jumps to his sword.

“Stay quiet,” he hisses. The sound of light footsteps comes nearer, and quickly. Karkat is glaring at him but Dave pays him no mind, withdrawing his hand from Karkat’s mouth and reaching for his sword. He can hear the footsteps slow down—the person knows they’re there. That’s not a good sign. It would have been better if Dave had the drop on them. 

The fact that they’re still approaching, whoever it is, is also not a good sign. People who are eager for confrontation, Dave has learned, often have a reason to feel ready for it. Whether it’s a dude with a knife or a girl with a gun, they know that he and Karkat are there, and thinks that they’re vulnerable enough that a direct attack will work. It probably would have worked on anyone else, Dave reflects, and it’s only thanks to years of shitty instincts that he’s here now, ready to handle this at all. He’s not grateful, but he knows there’s no hope for the person trying to sneak up on them now. 

“What the fuck?” Karkat hisses, too loudly. Dave ignores him. The footsteps have paused—he guesses at the next aisle. Dave pushes Karkat to the side, stepping slightly in front of him. He draws his katana and Karkat’s mouth drops open. “That’s a—”

“When I say go, grab your shit and go to the doors,” Dave tells him quietly. 

“No fucking way—” Karkat starts in an overly-loud whisper, and that’s when the person emerges from around the corner. 

Dave was distracted by this annoying cereal-muncher, so the first bullet grazes his shoulder as he turns away. The next one ricochets off his blade.

“GO!” he tells Karkat, who grabs his bag and sprints down the aisle behind him, which Dave is grateful for. 

He should have expected this, honestly. He knows that leaving his safehouse was dangerous, and dawdling, for any reason, was pretty stupid. He wasn’t the only one with resources—and only the crazies survived. 

The hulking man in a large coat, and, of all things, a tie and a Panama hat, fires off another two rounds in quick succession. Dave parries both of them, sending them spinning off into cereal boxes. He wonders if this is the sort of dude who once shook people’s hands and gestured to whiteboards. The ease with which he’s holding the gun belies expertise—but it’s Texas, so that doesn’t mean anything. 

Dave takes a step back and hopes that Karkat’s long gone. Dave can defend himself, but Karkat probably can’t—and Dave has enough blood on his hands. 

“Leave it, Junior,” the man says steadily, “give me all your shit and scram.”

Dave ignores him. From this close, it’s easy to see the telltale blistering redness of his skin as a result of radiation sickness. He probably doesn’t have long, anyway. That’s sickly reassuring--it means that Dave won’t have to hold back, because dying of radiation poisoning is slow, and Dave is fast. He still has to find his advantage, of course, but as soon as he does, it’ll be a smooth takedown. 

He’s still backing up. 

Dave is used to fighting against opponents who are bigger than him. He knows what it is to face down someone who is twice his size and has murder in their eyes. Hell, he grew up with it, and that’s the only reason he knows how to deal with it now. He puts himself on the defensive, looking for ways the environment can boost him. 

Get on his level, Dave thinks. I just have to get on his level. 

He has the beginning of a plan forming when the guy shoots off the last of his bullets, embarrassingly wastefully and missing by a solid foot. He looks discomfited too, probably used to being a better shot. Another sign that the sickness is getting to him. Dave doesn’t flinch, and the guy’s gun clicks on empty chambers. The plan is even a good one—and becomes completely irrelevant in the next minute, of course, when the man pulls out a large metal bat and swings it, demolishing dozens of brightly coloured cereal boxes. Cornflakes spill out over Dave’s feet, and he only has time to think, oh shit, with a certain amount of gravitas, before the bat is being swung at him. 

He dodges, but barely. His stance is off when he lands, he slips on a piece of cereal and lands on his ass, katana still clutched in his grip but probably no use against a metal bat, no matter how unbreakable it might be. 

The man advances a step further, and raises the bat far above his head, unnecessary, Dave thinks, when just dropping it would be enough to brain him, but good for the effect. He only has time to be grateful he didn’t die in the shitty apartment when—

“Hey, fuckass!” Someone shouts. 

Dave’s eyes snap open from behind his glasses. Karkat. The stupid fucker had chucked a can of beans at the man’s head and knocked off his hat. The can rolls off under a shelf, and the hat lands gently to Dave’s left. The man pauses, and turns slightly, his yellow teeth pulled in a snarl, as his sickness addled brain forgets about Dave and turns on Karkat instead, bat raised. It was a blindingly stupid stunt for Karkat to pull—he is literally defenceless—but it gives Dave the chance he needs. 

He jumps to his feet and lunges, faster than the man can see with his sickness, and slashes his sword deep into his swinging shoulder. Thick, tacky blood drips down his shoulder, too viscous to be healthy or normal. He darts back as the man stumbles, half turning to Dave, even as his bat slips from his fingers. For good measure, Dave raises his blade again and carves a large slash across his stomach—not deep enough to eviscerate, but enough to have the man doubling over, clutching at it. He falls to his knees. His hands skid on the floor, leaving dark red bloodstains. He reaches clumsily for Dave with his good arm. Dave jumps back and sprints away. The guy’s as good as dead. 

He doesn’t look back, but can hear Karkat’s steps behind him. He doesn’t stop running for three blocks, and Karkat is panting by the time they stop. He drops two bags on the ground and puts his hands on his knees to catch his breath. Dave watches him a bit warily—he had no intention of keeping this guy around, really, and most people don’t like watching real people get sliced up as much as they liked it on TV.

“You,” Karkat says, glaring up at him from under messy black hair, “are the worst fucking person.” He shakes his head. “You better be grateful I grabbed your bag—”

“Shit,” Dave says. He had completely forgotten about it, but it’s sitting there in front of Karkat, still zipped, and containing everything Dave keeps on him at all times. It’s the first time he’s forgotten about it. “Yeah, thanks.” 

Dave leans back against the wall of the building—a Waffle House, because of course-- and closes his eyes briefly. This was a stupid adventure, and he has no clue what to do next. The adrenaline is wearing off and his arm burns from where the bullet grazed him. It’s oozing blood gently. Nothing deep, but really fucking annoying, and pretty fucking dangerous, if he’s going to let it stay open in the irradiated Texas heat. 

“Shit you’re hurt,” Karkat says and Dave opens his eyes. Karkat’s managed to sneak up on him—how the fuck—and is standing a lot nearer than he was, scowling at the scratch on Dave’s arm. 

Dave has two choices, and neither of them are appealing. On the one hand, he could split ways with this weirdo now, leave the guy to figure out his own shit, probably die sooner rather than later, and head back to his apartment unfollowed. On the other hand, he knows that the wound is going to be hard to reach-- it’s on is right arm, so he’s at a disadvantage until it heals, especially if it gets infected—he could bring Karkat with him, expose his safehouse, and get medical treatment. It’s not exactly a shallow cut and it burns—fighting with an open wound is not the smartest thing Dave has done. 

He looks at Karkat, and regrets that there’s not really a choice. 

“It’s fine,” Dave tells him. “I’ve had worse. We should keep moving. If the guy had buddies, we could be followed.” He rips a bit off of the hem of his T-shirt, and wraps it around his arm. Good enough for now.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> visiting the apartment, Karkat is in the running for most fucked up, and wait-- is the sky supposed to look like that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to the second chapter! our boys are fucked up, but that's okay, because it means y'all get some backstory
> 
> warnings for this chapter: lots of past-child abuse chatter plus the cult warning comes into play, some vague mentions of suicidal ideation and PTSD-like symptoms

Karkat follows him trustfully, which is a testament to how shitty his life must _not_ have been so far. Dave learnt early on never to trust anyone: not the hand who fed him and didn’t, not the neighbours, and not anyone. He’s grateful his paranoia never grew to be a fully fledged thing of terrors like his—like Him, but it had always been though to keep Dave on his toes, especially wary of whatever might lurk around the corner, wary of whatever trap was being set with promises of apple juice and ramen if he came out. More often than not, it came down to a fight, and a fight always came down to a loss. 

Karkat doesn’t seem to have those instincts. Dave’s a little jealous. 

They take the long, winding way home, in case there actually is someone watching. Karkat isn’t as fit as Dave, but despite his stocky legs, he isn’t slow, so they make good time, and the sun is only barely reaching the horizon when they reach Dave’s apartment. They climb the stairs to the top, twentieth floor. Karkat complains bitterly starting at the tenth. 

The apartment is a mess: Dave knows this objectively but had never considered how it might look to an outsider. There has only ever once been an outsider in the apartment before, back when Dave was almost too young to remember.

Dave watches as Karkat’s eyes take in everything, from the pieces of fluff and disembodied corpses of the puppets, to the fragments of dismantled electronics, to the pile of shitty swords on the coffee table and the less shitty swords lined up by the door. His eyes dart to the iron curtains on the window, drawn open to show a hazy orange sunset over the remains of the city, and the six locks on the door. His eyes don’t get wider, like Dave kind of thinks they should, but his frown gets deeper. 

“Is this a normal house?” he asks. He sounds completely guileless, too, like it’s an honest question. “It’s disgusting.”

Dave stares at him. He’s not the best example of what healthy household is, but even he knows that most places do not look like the disaster that is this space. Hell, if TV and movies and the shitty videos his friends used to send on old chat clients are true, it’s not normal to have any swords, much less six locks and live wires and traps galore. 

“No,” he says finally. 

Karkat’s eyes dart to him and away again. 

“How the fuck don’t you know what a normal house looks like,” Dave says. He closes the door behind him, compulsively doing up the locks. 

Karkat puts down his backpack and doesn’t look at Dave as he starts to take out cans and put them on the empty kitchen counter. Corn, beans, and peas emerge before he answers. “I grew up-- sheltered, I guess,” Karkat says. His face twists into something like a grimace, but the angle makes it hard to tell. Dave stays still and listens. “I mean, it was a fucking cult, basically. They were convinced that the second coming was going to happen, and that everyone except those protected by the Second Saviour,” Dave can hear the capital letters in the words, “would die in fire.” He huffs out a semblance of a laugh. “Yeah, they got that part right, I guess. But not much else.”

“So… you were Jesus,” Dave says, and the bitterness grows on Karkat’s face, twisting it hatefully. The setting sun make his eyes glow red as he looks at Dave. 

“I’m not!” Karkat bangs his hand down against the countertop. “I never was! They were all just idiots who thought that I had to be, because the stars fucking _aligned_ or something, and look where they ended up now! They’re all fucking dead!” 

Dave doesn’t need to hear it to know what Karkat is thinking. It’s written on his face, clear as day: It’s my fault, it reads, it’s my fault that they’re all dead. He feels sick. He feels like he’s staring into a mirror. “What happened?”

“I was put in—they called it the Hive, over the weekend, every weekend. It was—well, one of their fucking rituals, it doesn’t matter. But the room was sturdier than the rest, I guess, because when the time was up and the guide opened the door, there wasn’t anything left.” He shrugs, but a heavy shrug that speaks of ruin, desolation, and the endless wastes. “We were pretty near one of the blast sites. I think it’s because the compound was underground.”

“So someone else is alive too?”

“She left,” Karkat says dismissively, though his hand clenches around the fake marble countertop. “I don’t think she believed it as much as the others. Or maybe everything was just too batshit for her to deal. She took the truck and fucked off to find her sister.” He shrugs again and shoves his hands in his pockets. “I walked.”

His tone says a lot. It speaks of the endless desert wastes that Dave can see in the distance, of the clouds of dust that don’t settle for days after cities are razed, of the rubble and all the things that are not left standing anymore. It speaks of the loneliness, the thing that Dave doesn’t want to speak of, the giving up that he’s been so close to doing. When you believe that you are one of the only ones who are crazy enough to survive the apocalypse, live with the deaths that you caused, directly or not, by leaving them outside—it’s not something that’s easily described. 

“I closed my door,” Dave offers. 

It doesn’t mean much, in and of itself. He remembers the way the sweat was dripping down his neck at the time, the way that the pounding on the door got stronger as it got warmer, hot enough that each breath seared his lungs, and then weakened to knocks, slowly, and then stopped completely. He remembers the way he used the age-old trick of climbing between windows and onto the roof after it was all over so he didn’t have to face that what he’d left outside. The heat had been so extreme on the roof that he’d immediately retreated in again; he later found out that’s what saved him as the second wave hit and he used up his water and apple juice stash, gnawed on uncooked ramen, and sat miserably with his closed door for a week. 

“I didn’t let him in,” he corrects. The act of closing the door doesn’t matter relative to the person who died on the other side. “But I think he deserved it.” It’s a cruelty he’s only ever thought in his head before, but that doesn’t make it less true when he says it out loud. 

Karkat’s eyes are sharp on Dave’s. Dave is still wearing the sunglasses—they’re the only things that make him capable of seeing, since that second blast. He’s pretty sure he’s fucked up his eyes irreversibly, but it’s not like it matters. Dave gets the feeling, though, that despite the glasses, Karkat is looking right at him, right in his eyes. It’s unnerving. 

Karkat stares at him, eyes and skin practically glowing in the red haze of sunset, and doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t say, it wasn’t your fault. He doesn’t say, it was the wrong thing to do. He doesn’t say anything. 

The silence is interminable; it’s the silence, Dave thinks, of a world razed to the ground. How poetic.

“Hey, let me show you something,” Dave decides all at once. 

“Shouldn’t we deal with your arm?” Karkat asks. 

Dave shifts it. It’s more of a pounding ache now than a sharp sting. “After,” he says. Karkat eyes scan his face, but he nods easily enough. He leaves his bag in Dave’s apartment—Dave wonders if he has anything that’s so important to him that he couldn’t live without it. Probably not, if the cult thing is true. He probably had everything and nothing. 

Dave takes his backpack with him. 

He pretends not to notice the way Karkat’s eyes sweep about, cataloguing the dark stain on the mat outside the door that Dave had cast aside. He doesn’t flinch when the door closes, though, which is almost impressive. Dave doesn’t look at the mat. He’d moved the body, flung it out the neighbour’s window a week after the end of the world. Let someone else scavenge it for the expensive electronics; let someone else have the sword, he’d thought. He needed to leave, and for once, no one could stop him. 

They take the stairs up to the roof. Technically, they aren’t supposed to have access, but that had never meant anything to Dave’s living nightmare. The door was long since jammed and reprogrammed, and the alarm had stopped going off early in his childhood. It was once an easy escape as much as it was a terrifying dead end. Never a good place to be, but sometimes the only place he could find. He feels chased even now, as he takes the steps one by one, slowly, because Karkat is still slow on the stairs. 

He pushes the door open and it only clicks. 

Outside, there’s the flat expanse of a concrete roof. It’s warm—everything is warm since the nuclear desolation hit with tons of atomic force. Of course, Houston was warm before hand, too, but not like this. Sometimes, Dave wonders if the itch on his skin is the radiation sickness sinking in, rather than just the dust and sunburn, destroying him from the inside out. He doesn’t mind, he thinks. 

Karkat squints as they emerge, but his eyes get used to it quickly and he looks out over the expanse of what was once Houston with wide eyes. 

“Holy shit,” he says. “Holy fucking shit.”

He spins in a slow circle, taking it all in. Dave watches him, and wonders if he’s ever been in an apartment block before, or even a city. His expression would suggest otherwise. 

Dave can almost see why it’s interesting, he guesses. The hollowed-out structures with their gaping windows, the blasted red sand of a wasteland in the distance, and roads that end in the middle of where they should, or are covered with desert sand and rubble, the dark shadows of places that had once been lit. The sign for the Wal-Mart is still standing, an eternal tribute to capitalism in a world that no longer has enough people for economy, and he can almost picture the way it glowed blue and white and yellow all day and all night, back when electricity had been a reliable thing. The reflection of the sun, sinking below the horizon, makes it an eerie imitation of what once was.

He remembers growing up here, on this roof. He hasn’t been back, not since everything was blown to hell. The eastern corner, where the air conditioning unit had been standing once upon a time, is no more, just a pile of rubble, a few stones, and a jagged ledge into the abyss. He wonders what happened—had something fallen? Had the windstorms ripped the air conditioning unit from the roof? Had it ripped someone from their apartment and tossed them over the city too?

The reinforced walls in his bedroom had never felt safe when he was younger. For the first time, as the bombs fell and the world obliterated itself, leaving only tiny pieces, Dave actually felt safe within his four walls, fortified with metal braces to twice their original width. The window of the bedroom, with its bars and metal shutters, finally gave him a place to survive, rather than a prison. 

The view out of his window faced the north, away from the worst of the destruction. He looks to the west, now, and watches as the sun sinks over the shells of the places that he used to go on the days he was allowed to leave the house. He remembers lying on the roof, bleeding, and aching, staring off at that McDonald’s sign. The Arby’s one is long gone, now, flattening the strip mall next door. There used to be suburbs, in that direction; they aren’t there, buried under the wasteland of sand. He remembers thinking that the people in those houses were oblivious, not because they weren’t scared of the apocalypse like his Bro, but because they could sit there, their whole lives, and never look at the city like he did. 

He doesn’t realize that he’s sunk into the trap of his own memories before Karkat pokes him with one hand. Dave flinches and draws his katana in one motion. 

Reflex, he thinks, staring into Karkat’s eyes, now wide with fear. It takes a second for his muscles to stop feeling tense enough to snap, and to relax into a place where he can sheath his sword again. There is no shadow of his Bro on this roof now, just some kid from a cult looking at him with shock but not fear, and Dave. 

Karkat is still staring at him. 

“You’re really fucking weird, aren’t you,” he says, and it’s not a question. “Jesus Fuck,” he continues, giving his own lord and saviour a new last name, “I go to my first Wal-Mart, and rather than the proper American experience, I get some wacko with a gun and some wacko with a sword, who I then follow to his house. Good fucking job, me. You’re literally fucking stupid.” His hands are splayed wide again, moving agitatedly.

“Not going to argue with that,” Dave tells him honestly. “The proper American experience died with the sane Americans.”

“There were never any sane people in America,” Karkat tells him. He looks at Dave carefully, but still not scared. “So, are you going to eviscerate me, too? That would be a perfect fucking end to this fucking day, wouldn’t it.”

He sounds so weary, so fed up, that Dave wants to laugh. It’s the first time he’s wanted to laugh in a long time. “No,” he tells Karkat. “I’m not going to stab you, not-Jesus. What kind of person do you think I am?” Karkat stares at him, and yeah, okay, it was the kind of question that answered itself, when you admitted to one murder by ignorance, and had held a sword to two people’s necks in the span of a few hours. His shoulder twinges at the memory. Whoops. “Fine, so I’m crazy, but I’m not that kind of crazy.”

“You’re carrying a sword.”

Which was also a fair point. “Hey, you’re not, and you almost got us shot today,” Dave points out. “Whose fault was that, huh? I think it’s my fault we survived.”

Karkat shakes his head and looks off at the distance behind Dave’s shoulder. His eyes dart to Dave’s face and back at the horizon. He squints, and points. Dave turns. 

“Is that normal?” he asks.

There is a dust cloud gathering on the horizon, a towering, infinitely tall cloud of debris and dust, tearing across the desert straight towards Houston. Dave can’t hear it yet, but he knows that soon, it will be roaring over them, deafening and deadly. 

Dave only has a second to think about the fact that no, it is absolutely not normal, before he’s grabbing Karkat’s arm and dragging him away from a deadly risk for the second time that day. He doesn’t pay attention to Karkat’s angry “what the fuck” as he shoulders the door closed behind them and tears down the stairs. He shoves Karkat into the apartment and locks three of the door locks.

“Get all the food you can find and bring it to the room at the end of the hall,” he tells Karkat. “Don’t fucking argue.”

Karkat doesn’t, eyes wide and startled, and goes. Dave shuts the blinds, throwing them into dim darkness, he shoves a chair under the door handle, locks the other three door locks, and shoves a shitty katana through the hooks on the blinds to block them from opening inwards under a blast. Karkat reaches his bedroom door seconds before he does, his bag once more full of cans and orange soda, and water bottles—clever guy, after all. 

Dave slams the door behind them, locks it, and thanks the gods, if they exist, that the seal still seems to be holding. He turns to do the window blinds as well, to shutter them closed against the oncoming dust storm, but Karkat is already there. He’s standing on Dave’s bed, wrestling with the jammed lock.

“It won’t fucking close,” Karkat shouts, louder than usual. 

Dave is starting to hear the roar of the sand, eating up everything in its path and clogging everything that’s outside. They don’t have much time unless they want this room to be filled with sand as well. 

He and Karkat both press their full weight against the stupid broken shutters—he should have fixed them after the last time, but he was so grateful to be able to leave at all that he hadn’t wasted his time on it. Too late now. He and Karkat both strain, he hears the creak of metal, and finally it shifts into place, closing with a slam. They only have a second to collapse on the bed and breathe before the roaring, groaning storm overtakes them.

Karkat claps his hands over his ears. Dave grabs his headphones and jams them over his own. For all the effort that had gone into building the room, he thinks, he could have at least made it soundproof. He finds a second pair—not his, taken, after the end of the world and the life as he’d known it, and passes them to Karkat, who slides them gratefully over his own ears. 

Even with the power of noise-cancelling headphones, it’s still unbearably loud. He grabs a box of Apple Jacks—wouldn’t have been his first choice, but he hadn’t done the shopping this time, had he?—and settles in for the long haul. 

Karkat is staring at him again. Dave offers him some Apple Jacks. His face screws up as though he wants to say something, but he doesn’t—it would have been futile, anyway, considering the fact that they absolutely can’t hear anything through the headphones, much less over the storm. 

They on the floor, backs against the bed, and munch away on Apple Jacks. Around them, the storm rages. 

At some point, Karkat falls asleep on Dave’s shoulder. Dave almost pushes him off, but can’t be bothered. He closes his own eyes instead, and less the rumble of the storm lull him to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you liked it :D please take a minute to comment if you can!
> 
> I'm still deliberating over the ending, because it's written a bit too open-ended for my taste. opinions on open-endings? am i seriously considering a sequel? should i just make this fic longer instead? leave it in the comments or let me know on tumblr [@everythingsdifferentupsidedown](https://everythingsdifferentupsidedown.tumblr.com). 
> 
> anyway, the next chapter should be up in three days :) see you then


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> so we're stuck inside for a while, huh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to chapter 3! 
> 
> warnings for this chapter: past child abuse, some blood (stitches), cults

He wakes up to someone poking him. His eyes flash open under his sunglasses, and he jerks away reaching for a sword that isn’t there. That drives his panic further, and he scrambles back across the floor, his mind a mess of jumbled thoughts. It’s dark in the room, darker, probably, with the glasses he’s still wearing. He can feel the frames pressing uncomfortably onto his face.

By the time he’s put enough space between him and his aggressor to feel safe, his vision has started to adjust, and Dave feels immeasurably more stupid. Karkat is standing in front of him, arms crossed, and a deep scowl on his face. His headphones are off and he’s saying something. 

Warily, Dave takes his own off in time for Karkat to say, “—go outside, now, or what?” He starts towards the door but Dave lunges for him and pulls him back. “What the fuck?” he screeches. 

“Dude,” Dave says. His voice comes out dry and cracked. He clears his throat and tries again, “dude, just because the winds have died down, doesn’t mean we can go out. It’s probably still hot as Satan’s asshole out there, dry as a sunburnt brick, and the air is not breathing quality. Unless you want rocks in your lungs, we have to wait it out.”

Karkat looks like he wants to argue. Dave lets go of his arm. “By all means,” he says, “go out there and breathe in the rubble. But I’m not coming after you this time.”

He looks pained, but reluctantly goes back to where he was sitting, next to the bed, arms still crossed. “Well, when you put it like that,” he grumbles. 

Dave goes to do the same but his side gives out a sharp protest. He had been ignoring the bullet graze on his arm this whole time, his battle dressing having been enough to stop the blood flow, but his shirt sleeve and bandage are soaked through with sticky, dark blood. Between the lunging to stop his local idiot from leaving the safe house to the preparations for the dust storm, he hadn’t thought about the strain that he was putting on his arm. Fuck. It’s probably infected or some bullshit, at this point. He can’t believe that he’d forgotten the whole point of bringing Karkat here in the first place, what with the storm. 

He sits back down where he was, flicking on the small power generator. It’ll eventually kill them with fumes, but for now, he needs lights. He reaches for his first aid kit from under his bed. It’s saved his life more than once over the years, and he’s even more grateful to have it now. Karkat is watching him. 

“I’m going to need you to help me out,” Dave tells him. “I have to clean the scratch, and redress it, but I can’t reach. I’ll walk you through it.” He’s done it enough times on his own that he figures it won’t be too hard to explain. 

“I can do that,” Karkat says. Dave blinks at him and Karkat blushes red under his brown skin. “I didn’t learn much while trapped in the stupid cult, but I learned the basics.” 

Dave wonders what more there was to the cult if Karkat had learned that first aid was the basics. He doesn’t ask, and passes the small Tupperware of band-aids and gauze to Karkat, and lets him look through the stash. His arm sears with hot pain every time he moves it, but he tries not to think about it.

Karkat rolls up his shirt sleeve, and pries off the fabric that Dave had tied around it, so Dave gets his first good look at the scratch. It’s about has deep as he expected, and not deeper, which is good, but the skin around it is inflamed and red, and it’s oozing slightly. Not the dark, molasses-like blood of the sick man in the store, but still not healthy looking. Karkat wipes away the dried blood gently with an alcohol swab. “You probably should get stiches,” he tells Dave.

“Can you do them?” Dave asks.

“I mean, I can—”

“Do it,” he says. Karkat frowns—apparently his default expression, it seems—but obediently pulls out the needle and thread. Dave looks way. He’s given himself stiches before, but he’s not a fan—it’s far from his favourite thing to do, and something about the needle going into his skin has always been worse than seeing the blood by itself. 

“Hey,” he asks, as Karkat threads the needle, “how’d you learn this stuff anyway? It’s not exactly go-to cult knowledge, right?”

Karkat takes a second to answer. Dave glances at him, but his lips are pursed in concentration. 

“I got lessons,” Karkat tells him, and Dave tries not to move as the pain becomes sharper. Karkat is focused on his arm. “Not in anything fucking useful, usually. Lots of fucking annoying bible verses. The first aid stuff came as an—accident, almost. I think they exiled the person who gave me the medical textbook. That’s what I fucking get, I guess.” His concentration doesn’t waver from Dave’s arm, there’s a tugging and Dave looks at the other wall of his room. “But I kept the book. It was useful. And my friend—the one who survived, with the sister—snuck me books every once in a while, too.”

“Did she believe you were the second coming?”

“I don’t know,” Karkat admits. “Probably. I never asked. It felt cruel, you know, because I never fucking believed I was chosen, or asked to be their saviour, so I thought I should play along as far as I could, and run when I got the chance.” 

Ironic, Dave thinks, that both of them got what they wanted only because everything else in the world was destroyed. 

“What were you going to do once you escaped?” Dave asks, if just to keep Karkat talking so he’s not thinking about needles and thread, or the way wounds look when they’re open and gaping. 

“Don’t laugh,” Karkat tells him, and Dave feels his eyes on his face, “but I actually wanted to go into nursing. Or like, child services. Helping people who get kidnapped into shitty cults like me.” He laughs, but it’s not happy, just bitter. “You?”

He had never quite figured it out. It felt too unbelievable, too impossible to dream of. There was no use in being hopeful for something like that, anyway, he’d always thought. Not when it was bound to crash and burn. 

“I never thought I’d live that long.”

The shitty truth, of living in a house that is your prison, of living with a person who hates you and hurts you, is that you don’t think you will survive. You don’t think there’s an escape—no matter how much you want it, no matter what plans you make in the dead of night, or what you erase from your hard drive, or what you steal, you don’t believe you could actually manage to get out, not under your own power. Dave had never once seen an escape from the thick-walled room that had been his bedroom since he was a toddler. He’d dreamed, of course, seen the bright lights of the Arby’s down the road, and been desperate to find it, to flee, to jump off the roof to see if he could make it—but he hadn’t. 

“That’s shitty,” Karkat tells him. He cuts the end of the string and wipes over his arm gently with an alcohol swab. “Done.”

“Thanks.” He moves his shoulder experimentally. It’s not going to be the least painful thing he’s dealt with, but it’s good enough. 

“How long do these storms usually last?” Karkat asks as he tidies away the extra bandages and slides them back under Dave’s bed. 

“No clue,” Dave admits, and opens a can of spaghetti-Os with only a slight twinge of protest from his arm. “Probably at least a few more days, plus time for the dust to die down.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Karkat looks around the room again, “and why is your apartment a bunker, anyway? Isn’t it kind of stupid to build a bunker on the twentieth floor?”

Dave stabs a spaghetti-O with all the viciousness he has. “Wasn’t my choice. He was completely crazy—he had calculated exactly how the apocalypse would happen in ten different ways, and built this room to last through them all, like a Noah’s Arc, only he was supposed to be the only living thing.”

“Who was he?”

Dave can feel the twist of his mouth, the nasty grimace that overtook him whenever he had to think about it. “My Bro,” he says. And then, in case it wasn’t clear, adds, “total nut job. Top of the line crazy.”

“The one you locked outside?”

“Yeah.”

Karkat nods as though that makes sense. 

It doesn’t of course. Nothing really seems to make much sense anymore at all, actually. 

They spend the rest of the day-- or was it night?-- In peace, snacking and mostly staying quiet. Karkat explores Dave’s room, his things in jars and his turntables. Dave shows him his most recent music project, and Karkat tells him that he never really had hobbies, being more of an ideal than a person. They fall into Dave’s bed next to each other, and even Dave, who has never been comfortable sleeping when there’s someone in the room, manages to close his eyes. 

“Could you teach me how to fight?” Karkat asks, finally, sometime after their next sleep. He’s staring at Dave again, his eyebrows pulled into a determined frown. 

“No,” Dave says. “Shit’s dangerous.”

“It’s more dangerous,” Karkat argues, “to walk around with someone who always needs your protection.”

Dave wonders when it became a given that the two of them would be leaving here together once the storm was over. It makes sense, of course, and Dave isn’t going to argue. He likes Karkat, even with his weird hang-ups and bizarre understanding of the world. He also, unfortunately, sees Karkat’s point. If they are going to go out there, and if there really are going to be people as feral as the man with the gun, then Karkat needs to be able to defend himself—or, Dave realizes, at least be able to get out of the way in time, so that Dave doesn’t have to watch his back too. 

“First lesson,” Dave says, “duck.” He throws an empty can at Karkat with his uninjured arm. It hits him in the shoulder. 

“What the fuck!”

“Duck,” Dave says, and lobs a pencil, that hits Karkat in the forehead. “That’s two points to me, dumbass. Move it.”

He lobs the next thing closest to his hand—a crumpled soda can—and this time, Karkat manages to dodge in time, but just barely. He comes up grinning, just in time to be hit in the chin with another pencil. 

It becomes a fun activity—Dave throws stuff, with or without a warning, and Karkat tries to dodge. By the end of a few hours, Karkat’s even got it mostly down. He changes Dave’s bandages—it’s not looking great, but better than before—and they eat spaghetti-Os and Corn Pops. Karkat jumps whenever the wind rattles against the building; Dave pretends not to feel it swaying under the wind’s onslaught.

It’s been about three days, probably, maybe four. His phone clock has been a bit screwy since the end of the world, and he doesn’t trust it. There hasn’t been any wind in a while, though, which odd, considering how long the storms have lasted before, but Dave isn’t willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, and lets Karkat know that they can probably head out. 

Both of them shower, Dave first—going quickly because he knows that the pipes are going to spit sand on him if he takes too long, and then Dave tosses out the trash—literally, out the window. He packs up all his gear: his change of clothes, the water, a few cans. He stocks up his backpack first-aid kit with all the remaining bandages from the Tupperware under his bed. He takes more swords than he needs, but not so many as to weigh him down, and only one shitty one. 

He finds himself staring around the apartment, feeling a little lost. He has the impression that maybe this will be the last time in a while that he’ll get to see it. It’s an odd feeling, and not one that he’s disappointed by. He stares into his bedroom, at his collections and his music gear. He takes his camera, his film camera, and a shit ton of extra film, but leaves everything else. He thinks, maybe, if they’re leaving for good, that he doesn’t need to bring all of it with him. That he doesn’t need any reminders of this place.

When Karkat steps out of the shower, he packs his backpack quietly, and they’re off. 

The stairwell down has never felt so long. Dave doesn’t look back up, though, because it finally feels like there’s nothing there for him anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gosh thank you all for your comments on the past two chapters!! it's been lovely to hear what you think!! feel free to keep leaving them ;)
> 
> in other news, I never knew how stressful it was to post something chapter by chapter, even when they're already written. after this, I've really got to stick to long one-shots because the anxiety of posting is killing me lmao 
> 
> hope y'all are safe and sound! next chapter will be posted sunday, along with a one-shot that answers the question of what the hell rose is doing in this post-apocalyptic world anyway


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> back outside again like a pair of dumbasses, and it all goes wrong (again) (of course). also, Dave has a plan that isn't a plan and more of a hunch, Karkat cares because that's what he does, and an unexpected visitor shows up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> second to last chapter :)) 
> 
> Warnings for violence and blood.

Outside, it might be midday, or close to it. The heat is astounding like it always it, but the sun’s glare is dimmed by the clouds of dust and probably also just normal clouds too that blot the sky. Dave pulls up his mask, and tosses one to Karkat. He doesn’t usually feel like it’s necessary, but he’s not taking risks. Well, not taking more risks.

The streets are empty. Of course they are; the end of the world had decimated the human population, after all, and a certain amount of the animal and plant population too, Dave is sure. He doesn’t know the stats—there’s no communication, anymore, not with anything, and the internet is basically bust because electricity is basically bust. If the population of Houston, some two and a half or three million people, is reduced to the total of two people that Dave has seen with in the three weeks since the end of the world, then the survival rate isn’t good. 

Hell, despite the bunker, there’s no way Dave is going to survive much longer in this wasteland, anyway. Too much going wrong; too many hazards and too many idiots. 

“Where are we going?” Karkat asks, squinting at him. He’s keeping pace, which is good. They’re not running—besides the fact that the ground in most places, especially in the shadows of buildings, where Dave is trying to keep them, is covered in sand, they don’t want to be dehydrated too quickly. At least not until they get there. 

The plan—well, the current one, until something fucks it up—started to take form in Dave’s mind as they packed up. It’s stupid, of course, but when has Dave, with nothing more than a grade school education, ever not been stupid?

“Hey, fuckass,” Karkat punches his shoulder—not the injured one. “Where are we _going_?” 

“Ow, jeez, dude,” Dave says. He looks at Karkat, who’s stopped in the shade of a building, arms crossed. He looks like he wants answers. Dave doesn’t have any, at least not existentially. “We’re going this way,” he points down the empty street, “until we hit NASA.”

Karkat stares at him for a couple of seconds with weirdly luminous eyes. “You’re serious.”

There’s a memory, at the back of his mind. Something he’d had to memorize, repeating it under onslaught, coughing up the words with a broken rib, staring at the concrete roof, dotted with his blood, no more than usual but the words taste like copper—

Dave brushes the memory away. 

“Uh, yeah,” Dave tells him, and keeps walking, “I mean, what else are we going to do. Stay back there?” They probably could, honestly, stay in the twentieth floor bunker if they picked up some more provisions. Dave doesn’t like feeling like prey, though, and it’s the only thing that crawls along his skin in the apartment. 

Karkat’s already caught up. “And what are we going to do at a fucking space agency? Talk to aliens?”

Dave’s plan isn’t quite that far yet. He shrugs, “not sure, but at least the square footage of their bunker is enough for two. Hell, they might even have electricity.”

Karkat growls an exasperated sound but they’re step in step again, trudging down the vacant streets. 

On either side of them are shops, most of whose names have been sandblasted away, erased by the storms of sand. Most of the buildings are covered, at least partly, in rubble, are missing walls, have windows cracked. Dave is almost used to the way the world looks, now, in the weeks since it ended. With the sand coating everything in a fine layer, he could almost believe it has been centuries, not weeks, since the bombs fell. 

Karkat doesn’t seem nearly as used to the idea of cities: he keeps looking around curiously, peering into windows as they pass, and scanning the parking lots. 

Dave is about to make some sort of comment—probably more offensive than he means to be, about Karkat’s cult education, when squealing tires and rising dust announce the presence of a car. 

It pulls into the parking lot of the strip mall they’re crossing in front of. Karkat starts to say, “hey, isn’t that—” but Dave yanks him behind a concrete pillar as a wave of shots rain down. The window of the shop in front of them shatters, scattering glass all over the sidewalk. A bullet zings past Karkat’s head, leaving a gouge in the concrete. 

“Shit,” Dave hisses. His hand is already going to his sword. A fight? Now? Who--

“Is that the guy from earlier?” Karkat asks in a loud whisper—no point in whispering since whoever is aiming at them knows where he and Dave are, but Dave doesn’t correct him.

Dave peeks from behind the column. “And some of his friends, looks like.” A sleek but dusty black car is parked horizontally across several parking spaces. As he watches, two men climb out: one, small and childlike but holding a wicked looking bat, and the second, three times Dave’s size, with an axe on his shoulder and more strapped to his back. He can make out a third figure wearing a funny hat in the back seat of the car, before the seated member pulls out a gun and starts shooting through the already broken backseat window. The bullets echo oddly in the empty street. 

Karkat is looking up at him with wide eyes. “What do we do?”

Nothing, Dave wants to say. There’s nothing they can do, two against two—not when Dave’s arm is still bandaged and Karkat doesn’t even know how to fight. They should just—give up, or something. Abandon this, and everything, and become yet another spray of blood on the Houston pavement. 

“We can see you,” a childlike voice calls. “Come on out! No need to hide.”

Karkat is still staring at him imploringly. “What do we do?” he asks again, hand fisted in Dave’s T-Shirt. He finally looks scared, the idiot. Dave kind of hates it. 

“You stay here,” Dave tells him. “I slice ‘em up with my sword, and you wait here ‘til it’s done.”

“That’s a stupid plan,” Karkat argues. “It’s two against one if you do that.”

“What, can you fight?” Dave asks. “Because last I checked—”

He doesn’t have time to finish his stupid comeback, because the concrete pillar where their heads were a moment ago explodes into chunks that fly through the air. It’s only thanks to Dave’s ever-present, post-traumatic instincts that he pulls Karkat down before they get brained too. 

The littler of the two men stands there, above them, holding the bat—which apparently took out a column? Fuck. That’s not a normal weapon, and not wielded by a normal guy. 

Dave pulls Caledfwlch just in time, barely parrying the next swing of a reinforced metal baseball bat. The shock reverberates through his arms, like the times that his Bro would take him seriously—hitting hard enough to grate Dave’s bones, just to prove he was stronger. 

Dave is used to fighting stronger opponents. 

“Oh no,” the man says pleasantly, pulling his bat back for another swing. “Diamonds told me you were a bad person with a big sword, but I didn’t believe him until now. That’s no good.”

This guy is another one of the certifiable ones. He sounds far too cheerful for someone attempting to crush their skulls. Dave looks to Karkat, who’s still crouched at his side and tries to tell him to run. Karkat shakes his head before Dave even gets the words out

“Don’t talk to them, Clubs,” the man still in the car orders, his voice unfortunately familiar as the guy Dave had left to die in a Wal-Mart, “just kill them.”

The small man comes after Dave a breath later. Karkat crawls out of the way, towards the store. Dave is parrying with all his strength, trying to push back, but not succeeding. The man’s probably a foot shorter than he is, but his small arms are that much stronger. Every time he slams his bat into Caledfwlch, Dave is sure it’s going to snap. It doesn’t; small miracles of unshitty swords.

“Aw,” the man says, “I really wish you’d just die. You weren’t nice to Diamonds.”

Completely crazy, Dave thinks, ducking under the next swing, and takes aim at the guy’s knees. He misses; the man skips backwards, immediately rallies for another impressive swing. 

Dave’s trying to pay attention to the situation in the rest of the parking lot, too. There hasn’t been anymore shooting—is he already out of bullets? Shouldn’t he be dead by now, anyway, what with the radiation and the fucking sword wounds? The hulking figure that had left the car with the small one is the realer threat, anyway. He’s taking slow, lumbering steps towards the two of them, dragging the back of the axe along the ground like a movie villain or something. 

Dave blinks, and almost gets hit across the face with a metal bat, but he parries, the shock reverbing through him like a bass at the worst concert of his life. The next second, he can only be glad that he taught Karkat to duck, because the big man swings the axe at Karkat’s neck like an executioner. Karkat, the idiot, dives, not out of the guy’s reach but for his knees. The two of them go down in a pile of limbs. 

He doesn’t have time to watch. The small guy is quick and dirty. He whips the bat around like it weighs nothing. Dave’s hands are slipping form the sweat. He takes a step back, putting himself on guard. The short guy tilts his head, like he’s waiting. Giving Dave the chance to attack? “Your turn!” he chirps. 

Nutcase, Dave thinks. The guy in the car clearly feels the same, yelling, “don’t say that, just kill him!”

Dave thinks about the small guy’s fighting style—clearly, he’s more about power and speed than strategy. All of his attacks have been direct. Before he can put that into a plan, there’s a grunt of pain from the other side of the parking lot. He sees Karkat’s body thrown through the air, crashing through a window. He doesn’t see Karkat get up. The big guy hulks after him. 

There’s a basic feint, you can do, with pretty much any starting position, so long as you can move your feet right. Once upon a time, Dave had practiced it until he was sick, and then three more times, spitting up bile. He could do it in his sleep. 

He suffers a nasty hit on his already injured arm, but manages to Dave slip through the short guy’s guard, managing a pretty good slash across the back of his legs, especially considering how weak his right arm is. “What? That’s no fair!” There is blood dripping onto the pavement, and his knees buckles. Dave kicks away his bat. “Diamonds,” the guy continues, “he hurt me!”

Dave doesn’t want to listen to he has to say anymore, and slams the butt of his sword onto the guy’s head. He drops like a rock, face first on the pavement. Not dead, hopefully, but at least down for the count. 

He turns just in time to avoid an axe quite literally thrown at his head. Apparently, the big guy had enough of Karkat—or maybe just didn’t like that Dave had knocked out his buddy. Dave risks a quick glance to the car, judging whether he’ll have to avoid bullets, too, but the gun has been dropped on the pavement, next to it, a Panama hat—the guy in the car’s head is bowed, like he’s sleeping or passed out. Good enough. He turns back to the most pressing issue. 

Karkat, the crazy idiot, is staggering to his feet. Blood is trickling down his forehead, and there are thousands of tiny cuts in his arms from the glass. The big guy is still holding two more fucking axes at the ready. Dave switches himself into offense mode again, trying desperately to come up with a plan. This guy is easily three times his size, maybe four. He’s got power, he’s got nasty weapons, and he’s not as dumb as the little guy, who’s passed out at Dave’s feet. 

When it doubt, charge. 

Bad choice.

The guy meets his blow with a one-handed block that almost has Dave drop his sword. Karkat lobs a loose brick at the guy’s head, but he slices it in two in mid air. The guy lets up the pressure on Caledfwlch for a second to lob the axe at Karkat. It embeds itself the wall of the shop, two inches from Karkat’s head. Karkat looks like he’s about to pass out, but starts trying to pull the axe out. Dave lunges at his knees, aiming for the same spot as on the little guy—if he can bring his enemy down to his level—

It doesn’t work, of course, because this guy is probably as fast as his Bro, even if he’s not as paranoid or crazy skilled. All it takes is a blow with the axe to Caledfwlch’s surface, and Dave’s sword skids out of his hands. 

He stares at it, a little bit at a loss. He hasn’t been disarmed so totally, so quickly since—well, in a long time. He is having more and more trouble distinguishing the pavement of the parking lot, with its yellow painted parking spaces, from the smooth unforgiving expanse of a concrete rooftop. It swims before him. 

“Duck!” Karkat shouts and Dave flattens himself to the ground—just in time, because the axe still takes a few hairs off his head. The rough pavement under his hands grounds him. He can’t stay still; this guy is far too ambidextrous and the other axe comes swinging around—what is that, the fourth?—with barely a second’s breath. Dave skids out of the way, the knees of his jeans ripping, in the opposite direction from Karkat, who is struggling to lift the axe he’s pried from the wall. The guy looks like he’s going to go after him again, and if Dave’s shaking knees are a sign, then it’s not going to go well. 

There’s a sudden spray of dust—a car skids to a stop. Dave can’t see through it. There’s a roaring sound, like a motor, and the sound of glass and metal giving way. 

The dust clears with the next gust of wind. Dave readies himself to go on the offensive.

In the same moment, there’s small blonde figure jumping onto the guy’s back and jamming—are those _knitting needles_?—into the big guy’s eyes. He falls, clutching his face, the gored sockets leaking thick, dark blood down his cheeks in rivers. He scrabbles at his face, fingers blunt and bloody. Dave can only watch him fall to the pavement. He doesn’t move any more. 

Dave stares at his felled opponent a minute, thoroughly confused. He glances at Karkat, but he’s staring at the newest addition to the weirdest day of Dave’s life, swaying a little, face bloodied. 

He looks up at the girl that saved them, and sees his own features staring back. 

“What the fuck,” Karkat says, succinctly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! let me know what you thought :)) only one more chapter to go-- it's a short one, just wrapping up details and whatnot 
> 
> if you're interested in reading more from this AU feel free to check out the second fic in the series which runs parallel to this one and is about Rose (mind the warnings on it-- it's arguably darker than this one). it'll be up later tonight if I can get my act together :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the end-- or the beginning? why is rose cooler than us? and why do people have the weirdest weapons of choice at the end of the world??

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for sticking with me through the past 10k! here's the last chapter (for now? there's probably going to be a sequel but not soon, since uni is kicking my ass) 
> 
> no, i didn't proofread this chapter. yes, i'm an idiot. yes, i'm also way stressed right now. I'll figure it out later *upsidedown smiley*
> 
> warnings this chapter for violence and blood and past child abuse

“Rose Lalonde,” she says, holding out a hand (not the one, Dave notes, that’s holding two bloody purple and black knitting needles). “You must be Dave.”

Dave doesn’t take her hand. He’s already shaken one strangers’ hand this week, and that hadn’t been his doppelganger. Karkat is sitting on the curb, looking pained but not like he’s about to fall over anymore. Dave shoves an alcohol swab at him, which he takes with a grimace, but starts dabbing at his face, anyway. 

“Who the fuck are you,” he asks instead. 

She drops her hand casually, like she is the one spurning him at the local board of governors meeting, and not him—which was just unfair. Besides slightly longer hair (though, since Dave hasn’t bothered in a while, it’s not nearly as different in length as it would be) and the black lipstick she’s wearing, they could be almost the same person. They’re even the same height. 

She quirks an eyebrow and crosses her arms across her chest, looking superior despite the dust. “What, you don’t remember?”

It’s eerie seeing so many expressions on a face that looks so much like his own. He doesn’t shake his head, and elects not to quirk his own eyebrow, for fear they’d mirror each other more than they already do. There’s something, niggling at the back of his mind, like one of the other many memories he’s elected to push away over the years. The sand whips up in the wind behind her, and her white hair dances in front of her face. He feels like he should know who she is—besides the fact that she’s wearing his face, albeit with lilac eyes. 

He doesn’t chase the memory, and lets his eyebrows dip into the closest thing to a frown he’ll allow. 

“What the fuck,” Karkat repeats. He’s stopped picking the larger pieces of glass out of his arm and is staring at Rose in confusion. Dave’s with him on that one. “Dave, who _is_ she?” The girl looks at Karkat, scans him up and down briefly, before apparently dismissing him. Dave feels his eyebrows dip further into a frown. 

“Oh,” another person says, suddenly standing next to the girl, Rose, whatever, “my.” 

Dave draws his sword before he can process that this is just another teenage girl, though at least this one looks nothing like him. She’s taller than he is, though, which is entirely unfair, and, most importantly, holding a bloody chainsaw like a weapon. It’s not turned on, but it no less threatening for it. Bats and axes and now chainsaws? People are insane at the end of the world. 

“Holy shit,” Karkat says quietly, “where did she come from?” He also apparently missed this girl’s arrival. It doesn’t make Dave feel any better about his reflexes being shot to hell, but he’s glad there’s someone else who agrees that this is bizarre. 

“Are they dangerous?” the newest addition to the weirdest (and only) party Dave’s ever been a part of asks Rose. Her voice is smooth, and she frowns at them. She hoists the chainsaw a little bit higher. “I took care of the car. And the man.” 

Dave glances over—not because he doesn’t believe this scary lady could definitely take care of a car, but just to try to make sense of the situation. There is, indeed, a brutal gash through the front of the car, where the engine might once have been, which explains the sudden cacophony after the dust has settled. He didn’t think chainsaws could do that, especially not hand-wielded ones. There is also a telltale splatter of blood across the car, and the door where the man from the grocery store had been sitting is open, at least blocking any view of the gory details. 

“I’m going to be sick,” Karkat says vaguely, shifting closer to Dave. 

He holds his sword a little bit more tightly in his grip, even as Rose laughs lightly in response to the other girl’s question, rather than Karkat’s announcement. “I don’t think so. Are you dangerous, Mr. Strider?”

“Depends on whose asking,” Dave tells her, honestly. “Who the fuck _are_ you?”

The tall girl lowers the chainsaw, and maneuvers it so it’s strapped on her back instead—which can’t be safe—and reaches out her hand past Caledfwlch to Dave. “My name is Kanaya. We have come to find you.”

What is with these people and shaking hands, Dave wonders. He doesn’t take it, but doesn’t knock her hand away either. He can feel Karkat vibrating with tension at his side. “Find me for what?”

“Oh,” the first girl—Rose—says. “You really _don’t_ remember. I thought that you were being facetious.” She steps forward, still smiling oddly, but not menacingly. “I’m your cousin—your father’s sister’s daughter. We lived in New York.”

There is something in that that makes Dave feel like he should remember. They never got visitors, at the apartment, because Bro didn’t trust anyone, or anything, not even Dave. There was that one time, the first time he remembers leaving the apartment, and the only time anyone ever entered. He’d always assumed he’d been alone the first time he left, sitting in a booth in Waffle House. Staring at the strange girl—his cousin?—across the ravaged parking lot now, he feels like that can’t be true. There was a woman, with hair as pale as his, sitting in the booth across from him. A girl at her side. She’d worn a white pantsuit, and Dave remembers wondering if it was CPS, which was silly, because Bro had never let him be registered in any government system at all. 

The woman had smiled at him, though. It reminds him of Rose’s smile, now: not entirely sincere, hiding a lot, and frozen on her face. She is staring at Dave searchingly. He feels like he’s searching right back. Finally, he lowers his sword. His arm twinges in protest.

“You’re joking.” Karkat is the one to break the silence.

“Not at all, I’m afraid,” Rose says smoothly, and she’s no longer smiling, but staring at Dave with haunted eyes. He gets the impression for the first time that this might be just as weird for her as it is for him. It’s like staring in a distorted mirror. “My mother is dead. I figured it was time to find my next of kin.” This is not the full story. Dave knows it like he knows she’s not lying, like the thing that had drove him from his apartment today drove her here to Texas in the flashy sports car behind her. 

She moves her gaze to Karkat, finally frowning. “And you are?”

“Karkat Vantas,” he says, sticking out his hand. “Not-Jesus.”

Rose takes it. “Enchanted.” Dave can’t tell if she’s serious. 

As touchingly absurd as the scene is, there’s something bothering him, besides his apparent sudden willingness to believe anything he hears. “How did you find us?” he asks Rose. 

“We’ve been in Houston for two days, looking,” Kanaya tells him. “Theirs,” she gestures to the bodies littering the parking lot, “was the first car we’d seen. That in conjunction with the gunshots, and we hoped there might be an organization of survivors.”

“There isn’t,” Dave says. “That guy was just some asshole from the supermarket. I thought he was dead already.”

“He should have been,” Kanaya agrees, staring at the car. She’s eerie too, though not in the same way as Rose. Rose is eerie because she wears Dave’s face with more expression and purple irises, and keeps an infuriating smile on her face while she presents facts that shouldn’t be true but he knows are. Also, because she’d jumped on the back of a man three times her size, plunged needles into his face, and her knitting needles are still dripping blood on the tarmac. Kanaya is spooky because she wields a chainsaw like it weighs nothing, and is a solid foot taller than anyone else. 

No one seems to know what to say. They stand there, in a parking lot that is dead silent except for the wind over the sand, shifting rubble. It picks up, and a long-abandoned umbrella goes flying down the street, tumbling like weeds. 

Dave looks at the sky at the same time as Rose (his cousin, what the fuck). The clouds are swirling, too quickly to be normal; to the west, the sky looks dark and menacing. Apparently, had been right to think it suspicious that the storm had only lasted three days. This looks like rain, but who knows what that means in a world that has no rules, not even about weather. It hasn’t rained in weeks. Another chill breeze flings sand and silt through the air, stinging Dave’s cheeks. 

“We should continue,” Rose says, before Dave can. She’s also watching the slowly growing clouds. “Let’s go, Kanaya.” 

Rose turns back to their car, Kanaya’s hand intertwined with hers. 

“Are we going with them?” Karkat asks Dave, turning to look at him. Despite his efforts with the cloth, his cheek is still a mess of small cuts, dirt, and dried blood, but he’s still looking to Dave for direction. Dave looks away. 

First, he looks again at the clouds, which are darkening abnormally quickly, then, to the wreckage of the parking lot, the three bodies—two at least unconscious and maimed, one likely dead. Finally, he looks at Karkat. For a great leader, he’s putting a lot of trust in Dave, who has historically never been good for anything but getting beat up, much less decisions. He thinks of standing in the alleyway, looking at Karkat and knowing he would die if Dave left him there. He thinks of standing on the roof of the building, how wide Karkat’s eyes had gotten, looking over the city, because he’d never seen anything like it. 

“Wait,” he calls to Rose. “We’re coming too.” He drags Karkat with him, fighting against the wind to get to the small car. This is their best chance at survival, and fuck it, Dave kind of wants to survive. 

Rose throws the passenger door of the car open and slides in. “Of course you are,” she tells him, voice a little bit louder than before, because the wind is whipping around them. “How else will you repay me for saving your life?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so that's the end (for now) :D first chaptered fic i've completed an posted (like, ever?? somehow), though with the end like it is, who knows-- i'm definitely interested in writing more in this universe because it was fun, but school is sucking out my creative juices as always so no promises <3
> 
> thanks again to all of you who have been commenting!! I've appreciated it a lot :DDD hope you are all safe and well!
> 
> as ever, you can find me on tumblr [@everythingsdifferentupsidedown](everythingsdifferentupsidedown.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> hope you are all healthy, safe, and staying inside, unlike our poor protagonists  
> please leave a kudos/comment if you have a minute! it means the world <3
> 
> if you want to chat with me about this AU or any other you can reach me on tumblr [@everythingsdifferentupsidedown](https://everythingsdifferentupsidedown.tumblr.com)!!


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